Chat with Tuli Kumar

Artist & Poet

About Tuli Kumar

In 2017, Tuli Kumar stapled a 42-page chapbook, hand-set type, charcoal-smeared margins, ink smudged from subway platform drafts, to the bulletin board of City Lights’ back room and vanished for three months, returning with a series of oil-on-burlap portraits titled 'Breath Stops at Third Avenue.' His work refuses digital reproduction: every poem is drafted on found paper, train tickets, pharmacy receipts, torn library checkout slips, and each visual piece embeds erased lines of verse beneath layers of translucent gesso. Unlike his Beat predecessors, Kumar rejects autobiographical confession in favor of what he calls 'witnessed anonymity', writing from the vantage of the barista, the bus driver, the woman folding laundry at 4 a.m., never naming them but rendering their rhythms in fractured iambic pulses and off-kilter brushstrokes. He co-founded the Midnight Press Collective in Oakland, which publishes only analog-only editions, requiring readers to transcribe poems by hand before they’re archived.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Tuli Kumar:

  • “How did riding the 22 Fillmore bus shape your poem 'Static Between Stops'?”
  • “Why do you erase half the text before sealing each chapbook in wax?”
  • “What’s the story behind the burnt matchstick embedded in 'Ode to a Payphone'?”
  • “Which three objects from a laundromat inspired your latest triptych?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Tuli Kumar study under any known Beat poets?
No—he deliberately avoided mentorship from living Beat figures, citing their tendency toward mythmaking over craft. Instead, he apprenticed for two years with a retired typesetter who had worked on Kerouac’s early broadsides, learning letterpress not as nostalgia but as resistance to algorithmic line breaks.
Why does Kumar refuse PDFs or e-book versions of his work?
He argues that screen-based reading collapses temporal experience—the pause between stanzas, the weight of paper, the accidental smudge—into uniform scroll velocity. His 'Analog Integrity Pact' requires all distributors to destroy digital backups after printing, verified by notarized affidavit.
What role does silence play in Kumar’s poetry structure?
Silence isn’t absence—it’s scored. He uses blank space calibrated to breath intervals (measured via spirometer during drafting), and prints certain pages on rice paper so thin that light from behind reveals ghost lines of earlier drafts, meant to be read only when held up to a window.
Has Kumar’s visual art been exhibited outside California?
Only once—in 2021, at the Helsinki Contemporary Annex—but under the condition that all lighting be incandescent (no LEDs), walls unpainted concrete, and no wall labels. Visitors received handwritten index cards with phonetic pronunciations of poem titles, since Kumar insists meaning shifts when words are seen before heard.

Topics

artpoetryliteraturecreative writingvisual artpoetsartists

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